Traditional Craft Techniques in Contemporary Art: Part 2

Evidence of the first woven textiles date back to around 5000BC, but other experts put it even earlier. Either way, textile-based crafts have played an important role in ancient civilizations through to modern day. Techniques such as weaving, knitting, bonding, felting and embroidery have been used for both practical uses, and as important signifiers within cultures. From the styles, techniques, materials used, to the thematic references, all aspects combine to express significant stories reflecting heritage and cultural identity.

In part one I looked at ceramics, glasswork and calligraphy. Part two is dedicated to textile craft techniques that have emerged in contemporary art and some of the artists that have caught my eye.

Singularity, by Faig Ahmed, 2016

Tapestry

Tapestries are woven on a loom formed of two rollers, between which the threads are strung. The earliest known examples were found in Ancient Egypt with linen fragments found in pharaohs’ tombs including in Tutankhamun's. Early examples were also found in ancient Greece and China. However, the craft really found popularity during the European Middle Ages and Renaissance when tapestries became a symbol of wealth and prestige for the elite.

Faig Ahmed is an artist from Azerbaijan that reworks the classic Azerbaijani carpet into surrealist, contemporary designs. First his designs are digitally created, then the patterns are transferred into traditional materials. Azerbaijani carpet weaving in the country is a cultural tradition and recognized as an object of heritage. It’s even recognized as an UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The labor and discipline of carpet weaving is made more visible through Ahmed’s unraveling and fracturing of the distorted structural form in his works.

American artist Diedrick Brackens combines the traditions of West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American South in his work. Themes reference the artist’s own lived experience, identity, and ties in American history with narratives derived from African and African American literature and folklore. To make the tapestries, Brackens first hand-dyes the cotton – a material he uses in acknowledgement of its history – using commercial dyes and day-to-day pigments such as tea, bleach, and wine. The tapestries are then woven.

How Does a Girl Like You Get to Be a Girl Like You?, Yinka Shonibare, 1995

 Batik

Batik involves applying hot wax to fabrics to repel dye in those areas and then removing it to reveal patterns. Early examples of wax resistant techniques have been found in China, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt and India dating back more than 2000 years.  Artist Yinka Shonibare uses mass-produced Dutch wax-print fabrics which he calls ‘African cloth’ as they are popular prints used across West Africa. This is a bit of a cheat entry as he doesn’t directly use the technique himself but the colorful fabrics he uses have an interesting history. The fabrics were inspired by Indonesian batik designs but then mass-produced in the Netherlands, and sold to the colonies in West Africa. This creates a narrative within Shonibare’s work where he challenges notions of cultural identity, authenticity, colonization and globalization.

Mudun Falastin (Palestinian Cities), by Jordan Nassar, 2024

Embroidery

Embroidery is the technique of using a needle and thread to decorate fabric. Some of the earliest examples are silk and gold embroidery found in China that date back to the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 BCE). Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings show that clothes were also decorated using a technique like embroidery, and ancient Persians, Greeks, and Indians were familiar with the technique too.

Contemporary artist Richard Saja, uses embroidery to interfere with formal patterns of French toile. His colorful stitching enlivens Rococo lovers with wild hair styles and creates fantastical foliage and animals that clash with the rest of the traditional scene. The characters jump out of the compositions like an act of rebellion against the 18th century traditions as a comment on social and cultural norms. Through humor his works touch upon topics such as ecological collapse, manmade disasters, trans visibility and the rise of neo fascism. Jordan Nassar is an artist of Palestinian descent born and raised in NYC. He uses geometric patterning adapted from Islamic symbols in traditional Palestinian hand embroidery to explore notions of ethnicity, identity, homeland and heritage. The symbols are generated digitally and then hand stitched onto panels. Nassar thinks of embroidery as the first form of analogue pixilation.

Do you use ancient crafts in your art? Leave a comment below.